I mentioned figures like these to a local war tax resister when he asked me
about how the boycott was coming along and he said, “and what are the
national numbers,” thinking that I’d quoted him just the figures for
our area.

Fact is, the campaign has had a hard time getting much momentum. It has
little-to-no funding for publicity, and so has to rely mostly on the energetic
efforts of campaign volunteers to spread the word. We’re much too easy to
ignore at this stage — disappearing into the same hole as so many
frequently-forwarded emails about “what everybody should do.”

What would really get things moving would be if some big name folks — celebs
or well-known anti-war movement movers-and-shakers — were to sign on, or if
some of the more well-known anti-war action groups were to adopt the campaign.

NWTRCC
is a great resource for war tax resisters, and is full of the kind of
experience that a tax resistance campaign needs, but it seems to lack the
power — in terms of personnel, resources, energy, and influence — to actually
launch a big campaign.

When the preliminary tax resistance survey results were first being discussed,
at last year’s
NWTRCC
national meeting in Las Vegas, they showed that there was a lot of potential
support for a large-scale tax resistance campaign among anti-war activists.
I remarked at
the time:

[E]ven if we find a potential for this sort of tax resistance avalanche,
NWTRCC
alone doesn’t really have the resources to organize and launch it. My hope is
that we can package these persuasive survey results along with offers of our
own specialized expertise and sell the idea of such a campaign to one of the
larger national anti-war groups who could launch a campaign like this in a
heartbeat if they cared to. My own feeling is that this sort of thing is
exactly the sort of sustained nationwide civil disobedience campaign the
peace movement has been looking for; they just don’t know it yet.

For reasons that will become clear to Picket Line
readers soon, I have had reason in recent days to revisit these reflections.
And that, y’all, is a good tease. Stay tuned.

My bank has finally gotten around to writing me a letter explaining what
happened to my old checking account. The upshot is that the
IRS
seized $5.16 in a levy (which was all I had in the account at the time), and
Wells Fargo charged me $75 to reimburse them for the trouble. This put my
account into negative territory, so they’ve since charged me another
$31.50 in overdraft fees.

(Do these charges seem high to you? Me too. That’s a big reason why I decided
to leave Wells Fargo behind. They seem to have adopted a “squeeze every penny
you can out of your customer” business model.)

So add these to the “costs” in my cost/benefit analysis of this tax resistance
method.

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